This disclosure relates to database systems and more particularly to improving performance in a relational database management system.
Businesses are retaining data for longer periods of time to support business analysis and to expedite decision making to meet the increasing business demands and regulatory compliance requirements. Data warehouses are typically offering 100 terabyte+ to customers in order to meet this; however, given the high cost associated with enterprise storage, it is a challenge for a database administrator to justify the need to move the entire warehouse to faster leading-edge storage and delegate the slower (but still expensive) hardware for in-house testing. The advent of solid-state drives further accelerates the need for tiered storage where some data resides on the faster solid-state drives while other data resides on slower storage.
A multi-temperature solution, such as the one provided in IBM DB2 Version 10 provides the capability to store data in a tiered fashion with portions of “hot” data being stored on faster solid-state drives or high speed magnetic disk storage while “cooler” data are stored on slower storage in effect reducing the total cost of ownership regarding disk storage in a relational database management system where the solution is manually administered. Apportionment of data to appropriate faster or slower storage based on quality of service expectations is reliant on the database administrator's knowledge and understanding of the data on an ongoing basis. IBM and DB2 are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
DB2 Workload Manager (WLM) is a key component of the DB2 relational database software product. WLM is a workload manager that identifies, manages and monitors different activity streams within a DB2 database environment. Currently a database administrator has to understand the data in the RDBMS and manually apportion data into faster storage based off any WLM prioritization that may be in place. Any alterations to WLM prioritization will require manual movement of data to accommodate the updated WLM rules.